Sci-Fi Author Kim Stanley Robinson Discusses Our Planet's Future

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Sci-Fi Author Kim Stanley Robinson Discusses Our Planet's Future

Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Kim Stanley Robinson What better way to initiate the summer reading season than with a science-fiction trilogy on the potential horrors of global warming? The final installment of Kim Stanley Robinson's latest series, which includes Forty Days of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below and Sixty Days and Counting, came out in paperback in April. The novels rival his award-winning Mars trilogy in their vivid evocation of another world. But this time the world is Earth, dramatically but all-too-believably altered following sudden climate change.

Sixty Days and Counting culminates Robinson's most ecologically minded trilogy, and contains many provocative ideas for saving the Earth should glaciers suddenly begin melting. Wired News spoke with the author by phone about the potential real-life applications of his fantastic ideas regarding environmentalism, geo-engineering and our terrestrial future.

Wired News: You use the analogy of falling from a cliff when discussing humanity and climate change. Do you think coming changes will be so abrupt?

Kim Stanley Robinson: It's not the best analogy. But when I'm in the Sierras, because of the way the glaciers carved the landscape, you come to points where it's a difficult down-climb off a promontory to a better situation. That's probably what history in the 21st century is going to be like.

Many of the technologies we've invented are necessary to keep 6.5 billion people alive. We can't go back from that, so we need to decarbonize really rapidly.

WN: One of the main characters in the new trilogy is Frank Vanderwal, a scientist who leads a radical National Science Foundation initiative to respond, immediately and on a planetary scale, to climate change. Vanderwal becomes heavily influenced by Buddhist thought, and his own lifestyle becomes a form of Freganism – living without a single permanent home, communing in a deeply spiritual way with nature, accepting change and valorizing adaptability, living off the excess of our own over-producing society. Do you feel this to be the ideal mentality and lifestyle for a time of radical climate change?

Robinson: He's a character in a comedy who takes things too far. A lot of scientists act on their beliefs and so do things that look crazy to the rest of us. He's basically following the right line – but without going homeless or moving into a treehouse, all of us can look at the way we live and adjust accordingly. That's what novels are for in the utopian sense: to suggest modes of thought so you can examine your own life and see what you can do.

WN: Many of the solutions you propose in the trilogy involve some pretty radical geo-engineering – seeding the Atlantic Ocean with salt to restart the Gulf Stream, releasing a genetically modified lichen that enables trees to absorb more CO2 by growing to titanic sizes. Many people would be very unnerved by this approach, and worry that we could make things even worse for ourselves. What would you say to them?

Robinson: I'd be one of those people. We only have one planet to experiment with, and unexpected side effects and the consequences of these actions on a massive scale are so hard to predict. In the new trilogy, the big projects they do – particularly the release of the engineered lichen – are incredibly dangerous and unadvisable. What I wanted to suggest is that if things got desperate enough, there are governments that could decide to do things on their own and not wait for the rest of the world to approve. That could get bad.

In terms of geo-engineering, there's hardly a single project I think would be advisable. But if we fail to decarbonize, and it's 5 or 7 degrees hotter in 2050, there will be scientists and engineers saying they can fix it all with a silver bullet. And then the idea will be on the table.

If you pour salt in the North Atlantic because it's gotten too fresh and stalled the Gulf Stream, as in my book, then you're doing something relatively benign and un-dangerous. Salt would quickly diffuse; it wouldn't change much in the environment. It would be an attempt at remediation.

WN: In the Mars trilogy, you focus a lot on scientific advances that allow people to live far longer than is currently possible, as well as the mental and spiritual consequences such extensions would have. In the latest trilogy, with humanity faced by an immediate threat to its collective survival, such person-oriented advances are absent. Does this reflect your thinking these days?

Robinson: I think we do see in the health sciences a most amazing potential for better health, resulting in longer, healthier lifetimes. The kind of sci-fi magic pill I described in Red Mars, where you instantly get longevity doubled, is not likely to happen – but the gradual increasing of healthy lifetimes is a clear possibility. That's one of the ironies of our time: Right when we're on the edge of serious improvements in health care, we're also cooking the planet.

WN: One of the main characters in the Mars trilogy is Anne, who insists on maintaining the purity of Mars, free from human interference. You treat her sympathetically, even though she desires something that is impossible, given the scale of human planetary impact. Is sentiment such as Anne's possible, or laudable, at this point in time on our own planet?

Robinson: I think it's too pure, too caught up in a dichotomy of sacred and profane, where you call some things pure and sacrifice everything else to them. On Earth, I don't think that works.

I was really astounded by reading in Charles Mann's 1491 of how completely the New World was a human landscape – that we've been terra-forming and gardening the planet for a lot of human history. Now we're tremendously powerful at it, but we've always been powerful. Places you think of as virgin wilderness, these were humanized landscapes – parks, not wilderness. When we think of wilderness, we should think of it as a particular kind of park, where we minimize human impacts to see what happens.

I believe in wilderness, but as a kind of ethical position rather than a natural state. We could develop everywhere, but I hope we choose not to, so as to create biodiversity and diversity for humans. I understand Anne's feelings about Mars, but that same impulse on Earth rests on an improper comprehension of how humans interact with the earth.

We should conceive of ourselves not as rulers of Earth, but as highly powerful, conscious stewards: The Earth is given to us in trust, and we can screw it up or make it work well and sustainably. Something I've been more and more aware of as we face the mass extinction that we're about to start is that animals and landscapes need legal and philosophical representation as crucial parts of ourselves.

WN: How do you cultivate this sense in society if, for instance, you live in Brooklyn and the animals you see are rats and seagulls?

Robinson: I'd love those rats and seagulls as our horizontal brothers and sisters. That's a truly depleted ecology at that point, but you want to encourage the feral cats and raccoons. Where I live, even though it's a fully humanized little city, there's a fair amount of species that get along as suburban creatures. Here in California, we too have killed the animals and destroyed their habitat – we need our industrial agriculture to change, to include travel zones, habitat zones, so that you can create a civilization coexisting in the same space with other animals.

WN: In the new trilogy, the U.S. government embarks on a New Deal-style initiative to prevent the climate from going more awry than it already has. Many people dream of this now – but in the books, it only happens when the United States experiences storms and weather patterns more catastrophic than ever seen before. Is that what it'll take for us to engage climate change in a meaningful way?

Robinson: I hope not. That's going to be too late. I'm hoping the scientific community continues to go off like a fire alarm in a hotel, just as they have for the last five years, and that that will do the trick. If they do, the democracies, the political leadership and even big business will all recognize that this is a real threat. And we're seeing enough of the effects, even without catastrophic weather. Take glaciers, for example, which are melting so fast, and it turns out they are the source of water for one-third of the world's population.

Even India and China therefore have compelling reasons to get serious. Their own populations will be hammered by the loss of the Himalayan glaciers. So many effects are combining. I don't think we need the kind of minus-50-degree winter I described in the books.

Humanity is sane, and can make use of its intelligence. We have to act as if this is true. That's the whole story of the 21st century: Are we a sane civilization or not?